“By the fish,” Lal said. I blinked at her. “The fish we ate last night. Fish that swim in rough water taste differently from what we’ve been eating. I don’t know why that should be, but it is.”
I went on staring at her until she began to smile. She said, “That’s not true, Soukyan. The truth is that last night I was very happy with you. Happiness like that is rare for me, and I do not ever want to get used to it, because right behind it there comes trouble, always. So I said what I said about the river for luck, in a way. Do you understand me?”
“I was happy, too,” I said. There was more I wanted to say, but just then the front of the boat went up while the water dropped away under it and a wave thumped into us from behind, so that the front went down and down. I flattened myself out on the deck and closed my eyes. Lal said, “Ah. Now it gets interesting.” She sounded quite happy to me.
It did get interesting, very quickly. The little boat rocked and pitched ceaselessly; with my eyes shut, we seemed to be blowing over the water in every direction, completely out of control. Whenever I managed to look around for a moment, I realized that we were still somehow heading downriver, almost as straight as ever, only much faster; and that the waves were actually quite small for the power with which they slammed and pounded the boat. But they were all white now, white as ice-flowers, raw white as sangarti blubber when the great sheknath rip them open. And there were the rocks, black, ragged, there and there and everywhere, flying by so close that I could see the green and red mosses on their sides, waving dreamily in the rushing water. It was like racing forever down a long, foaming gullet, and I tried not to think to the belly at the end of the run.
“It’s an old river,” Lal called to me once, “and full of tricks. Deep old bed, any number of sly little sideways currents. We’re lucky it’s not in flood.” They are true, those stories about Sailor Lal. Crosslegged as always, drenched with bitterly stinging spray, her neck and shoulders so bruised yet that she could only look ahead, she eased our boat through that wildness like a needle through folds of silk. Sometimes she would sit absolutely still, neither hand moving at all on the tiller or the lines; again, she might lean back slightly or twitch her fingers as though coaxing a pet, and the boat would lilt this way and fall off that way and wriggle between two green-gummed rocks: a jaunty morsel eluding the teeth of the river one more time. Most often the bow was completely under water, and me with it—up and down, down and up, like the little prayer rags that boatmen in the west tie to their oarblades. Yet I will tell you that for once in my life I was shocked by my own excitement, and that I can understand better now why there are those who love to sail the bad water. I have never told Lal this.
For all that my Man Who Laughs had told us about Arshadin’s house being no castle but as plain as a shepherd’s hutch, we came very near to missing it altogether. In fact, the only reason that we did notice it was that we both saw the dharises, as Lukassa had seen them before us: there, circling near the windows of a reed-thatched cottage, a full dozen or more, where the sight of one in twenty years can have an entire village abandoned— fields, houses, and all—by nightfall that same day. They are smallish blue-gray birds, fish-eaters, rather plain except for the deep blue slash across the chest; and why, rare as they are, they should signify ill luck, disaster, and horror in every land I know, I cannot say. But there they were, crowding each other to roost on Arshadin’s sills, and I felt my face grow cold. When I looked back at Lal I saw her making a sign in the air with her left hand that I know now is meant to ward off evil. I would have done the same.
Lal threw the tiller hard left and shouted, “Hold it there,” as the boat veered against the wind and the current, laboring toward shore. I hung onto the tiller as she wrestled with the sail, but suddenly it bellied out hugely, unnaturally, and tore the lines from her hands. The boom swung around, caught my shoulder as I ducked, and smashed me overboard. I heard Lal cry out as I fell, but her voice was lost in the cold piping of the dharises as they came wheeling and fluttering above us. An instant later, the boat went over—the mast came down beside my head even before I had started sinking, and the hollow sections that fitted so perfectly together came all apart and whipped away past me. Poor little boat. I swear I remember thinking that.
What I also thought was, Well, Lal won’t be able to save you this time. Because there was no chance of her finding me in that boiling gullet; I hoped she had at least enough strength left to save herself. The river was slamming me into one downstream rock after another, and I was trying to catch hold of each one and not succeeding—the moss was too slippery, the current too strong. I asked—I do not pray—I asked to drown before I was beaten to death. I tried to say certain things that I was taught to say before dying, but the river dashed them back down my throat, and I went under again. After a while it stopped hurting. I felt as though I were falling asleep, moving slowly away from myself toward rest.
Then my feet struck the bottom.
If you want to hear anything more, be quiet and try to imagine what it is like to be certain that your body is lying when it tells you that you are alive. I tell you, standing there on firm ground, looking down to watch the water dropping to my chest, my waist, my knees, I knew beyond any question that I had died. At the monastery, we were absolutely forbidden to speculate on the afterlife (it was enforced, too, that prohibition), but when I turned and saw Lal a hundred yards upstream on a growing island of muddy riverbed, with nothing between us but a strip of water a baby could have splashed through— well, what could I think but this is how it is, after all, walking away with your friends into a world made new and new again with every step you take? And maybe that is exactly the way it will be. Like you, I hope never to find out.
The river had not parted for us, as in the old stories: rather, like a pet scolded by its master for bringing its bloody, wriggling prey indoors, it had recoiled, dropping us and shrinking away against the opposite bank, pretending it had never been interested in us in the first place. Listen to me—I know very well that rivers cannot behave like that, that no wizard you ever knew of could ever make a river do such a thing. I am agreeing with you, man—you have no idea how much I agree with you. I am telling you what happened.
Very well, then. I waded through the mud to Lal, and we stood together looking back toward the farther shore where the river cowered in less than half its bed as far as we could see. I think it was not even flowing; sunlight glints and bounces off moving water, but what Lal and I beheld was a silent, lifeless greeny-brown mass that might have been earth as easily as water. I was not frightened when I thought I was going to drown—I was frightened, terrified, of this, of the wrongness. Lal and I stood there: soaked, shivering, exhausted, up to our ankles in stony ooze, holding hands like children without knowing it. Neither of us dared to turn toward that wattle-and-daub cottage that we could feel looming behind us as high as a castle now, not even when the laughter began.
LAL
Laughter does not always mean to me what it does to others. I have heard too many madmen laughing in my life: men, and women too, who were not too mad to realize that they had the power to do anything they wanted. Yet I am alive, having heard them. I have even heard the laughter of the red sjarik at noon, and I am alive, and not many can say that. But this was the worst of all, this sound over those naked stones. There was no quickness of any kind to it, good or evil: no proper chaos, no surgingly joyous cruelty—no smile, even in its triumph. I will remember the dreadful smallness of that laughter when I have forgotten what it is to see a river stop flowing.
“Turn,” he said behind us. “Come to me.” We did neither. He laughed again. He said, “Easy to see whose students you are. As you will, then,” and he let the river go. We saw it flash into life, heard its great blinding cry of freedom as it sprang toward us, roaring back across its bed faster than any beast could have run. Any beast but us: we scrambled up the bank, wet and half-naked as we were, so frantically that I actually bumped into Arshadin and fell at his feet. Nyateneri had charged on past him, but he wheeled back instantly to help me rise. And that is how we first encountered the wizard Arshadin.
He was between us in height: a thickly-made man in a plain brown tunic, with a pale, bald, wide-jawed face. I say bald, not because he had no beard or mustache, but because—how can I make you see? Yes, the hair was graying; yes, there were folds around the mouth and creases framing the eyes—even a tiny old scar under his chin— yet none of that added up to an expression. Life gives us lines and pouches and the rest, everyone, even wizards, who live longer than most and always look younger than they are. But only our confusions give us expression, and Arshadin’s face was so bland of those that it appeared painted on, wrinkles and features alike. I have once or twice seen infants born far too soon to breathe more than a few minutes in this world: they have a cold transparency about them, and a terrible softness. Arshadin was like that.
“Welcome,” he said to us now. “Lalkhamsinkhamsolal—Soukyan, who calls himself Nyateneri.” His eyes were a strange hazy blue, seeming to focus on nothing at all, and his voice could have been a woman’s voice or a man’s.
Miraculously, my swordcane had somehow remained thrust into my belt. Edge or no bloody edge, it would still go through even a thick wizard. It embarrasses me to talk about what happened next—who should know better that because a wizard is not looking at you doesn’t mean he isn’t watching? But this man’s presence somehow filled my head with smoke, putting slow clouds between me and all my bitterly won skills and understandings. I lunged—quite prettily for a limping near-cripple— watched from far away as the point sank into his belly, and still had time to take him in the chest as he sagged toward me. Except that he did not sag, and that my blade came out with no burst of blood following it into the sunlight. No sag, no wound, no blood. Not a drop, even on the swordcane—only a wisp of something like bright smoke, and then not even that. He did not laugh now, but regarded me as though I had interrupted him while he was talking.
“Stop that,” he said, tonelessly irritated. “I have watched and touched every step of your journey. I can command rivers and dharises—do you suppose I am for your nursery sword, or that carpet-tack in your boot?” He clenched his left hand and opened it again, and Nyateneri—who had imperceptibly shifted his weight onto one leg, bracing himself for a certain spinning kick— doubled over, his face without color. If he made a sound, it was lost in the jubilation of the river.
Arshadin never looked at him. He repeated the gesture, and all my muscles turned to ice, holding me where I stood. He said, “Whatever your plans, they have failed. You cannot harm me, and you cannot help your master. Do you wish proof of that? So, then,” and he sketched a wide circle on the ground with one foot and spat into it, closing his eyes. Instantly a grayness shivered heavily within the circle, and within it stood my friend. This was no bodiless image, such as he had sent to me in the Northern Barrens: wherever he, and that grayness, truly existed, it was the man himself, snatched from bed in The Gaff and Slasher, blinking mildly at the three of us, whom he plainly saw and knew. He was still in his nightgown, but even so the sight of him made me feel as dizzyingly, immediately safe as it had one morning on the Lameddin wharf when my stinking, sheltering fish basket was suddenly lifted away and there he was, blinking. There he was.
“Well,” he said, looking vaguely around him. “This is a bit sudden even for you, Arshadin.” He did not bother to greet Nyateneri and me, but gazed up the slope at the thatched cottage with earnest interest. “A very nice job you made of rebuilding, I must say. No one would dream what it looked like, the last time I left here.”
“You destroyed my home,” Arshadin’s empty voice said. “I have not forgotten.”
“You have apparently forgotten that when I asked you to let me leave, flames leaped from the walls and great fanged pits opened in the floor. I regarded that as childish and ungracious, in addition to doing your woodwork no good at all. I said so at the time.”
Arshadin said, “What shall I do with your servants? What is their return worth to you?”
“Who? Them? Worth to me?” My friend stared a moment longer, and then he threw back his head and laughed in his way—as though no one in the world had ever even dreamed of making such a prodigious noise before—so that neither of us could forbear to laugh with him, wretched as we were and humiliated to have him view our helplessness. “Worth to me? Arshadin, you brought me all this way to ask me that? How often have I warned you about that sort of wasted power—it’s really not inexhaustible, you know. A simple letter would have done just as well.”
Arshadin had not yet looked at him directly. “Power is never wasted. Strength grows only with use. So, apparently, does frivolity. I will ask you again—what shall I do with these two?” His voice was flat and distant, hardly inflected even on the question.
My friend laughed briefly again. “Do? Do whatever you will, why should that be my affair? I told them not to meddle with you. I told them to stick to bandits and pirates—that in you they were dealing with a force beyond their imaginations, let alone their abilities. But they would challenge you, and now they must take what comes. I cannot forever be rescuing them from the consequences of their own folly.”
Does that sound heartless to you? To us it was music and miracles; it was food, clothing, home all in one. Riddle and berate us as he might, he would never abandon us—we trusted that as we could afford to trust nothing else in our separate lives. Nor am I even now ashamed of our dependence on him for our lives: he was depending on our wit, our attention, for more than that.
Heads lowered in feigned despair, we awaited the tiniest signal, while Arshadin watched us with his hazy pupilless eyes.
“As for myself”—my friend went on more briskly now— “if I were you, I would send me back to my bed as quickly as possible. You cannot get at me where I stand, and it is costing you energy—energy you can no longer spare—merely to hold me here. I am giving you good advice, Arshadin.”
He looked even more fragile than we had left him—I was amazed to see him on his feet. Nevertheless, his eyes showed a trace of the sea-greenness that had been gone for so long, and—most important to me—there were two bright pink ribbons twined through his bristly gray beard. I had last seen them in Marinesha’s hair. Arshadin answered him, saying, “Yes you always gave me good advice, and nothing more. I think it would be instructive for you to remain and see me dispose of your friends, or whatever they are. You might learn more of what you should know from that than ever I learned from you.”
His voice remained sexless and rigidly ordinary, but with the last words his face changed. If I had been frightened before of a face that gave witness to a lifetime of showing nothing, I was more frightened now of what happened to his eyes when he finally turned them on my friend. The bitter rage and loss in them made his heavy, shovel-shaped face seem strangely delicate, almost transparent, like a burning house just before it collapses on itself. His mouth was slightly open, the lips twisted slightly up at one corner, down at the other. I remember even now a fleck of cracked skin in the down corner. He said, “Afterward it will be time to meet those who are waiting.”
My friend was silent for a moment, then rubbed a hand across his own mouth, as I remembered him doing very long ago, when I would somehow come too close to winning an argument. “As you please. But if you are considering doing to them what I think you are, I must drearily warn you again—you cannot do it and still hold me in this place. You probably have the strength, yes”—oh, the gentle contempt in that probably would have maddened me, never mind an Arshadin— “but you have nothing like the mature precision that is necessary. If you did, I could never have escaped you, and if you had gained it since, I could not have remained out of your reach, as I will remain. Free yourself of me, have that much sense, and then—” He looked full at us and shrugged. “A nasty, messy little parlor trick, I always thought it—but there, your tastes are your own affair, quite right. Who am I, after all, to plague you with counsel? Quite right. Quite right.”
His voice had fallen into a sleepy singsong drone, which instantly alerted Nyateneri and me: that was the way he always sounded when he was about to set you a particularly exasperating riddle or challenge. He nattered on, buzzing away, turning slowly one way and another within the grayness like a fat fly against a windowpane. Arshadin’s deathly heed was all on him: he watched him with a completeness that—for that moment—left no room for us. We realized so suddenly that we could move that it was shockingly painful not to. I still remember that strange pain of stillness.
Nyateneri sprang first—I lost an instant in getting my sword clear, because of my bad arm. I heard my friend shout furiously, “Fools! No!” Arshadin turned the vermillion-striped face of a rock-targ on us, all bony frills and great dripping mouth horribly topping the same squat human body. Nyateneri never faltered, but lunged in under the neck-plates, bare hands reaching for the still-human throat, trusting me to follow with my blade. So I did, but the dharises swooped screeching at my eyes, hurling themselves against my face and head until all I could do was to flail at them with the swordcane, helpless to aid Nyateneri as he clung desperately to Arshadin’s constantly changing form—rock-targ to bellowing sheknath to eight-foot-high, axe-beaked nishoru to something that I would, quite simply, kill myself to keep from seeing again. Nyateneri held on and held on, sometimes with only one hand, riding barely out of reach between hairy shoulders or razor-feathered wings like some baby animal perched high on its mother’s back. He was laughing, his lips stretched grotesquely back from his teeth like any rock-targ’s, and his eyes straining wide in the same way. So Rosseth must have seen him when he killed those two in the bathhouse. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly, as it always seems at such times. In fact, of course, everything is happening so fast that your mind trudges along far in the rear, dusty and lame. I remember at some point glimpsing Nyateneri through that battering cloud of dharises and thinking quite seriously, Well, he certainly does enjoy this more than sailing.
My friend, for his part, was jumping wildly up and down in his foggy prison, kicking and pounding at silent gray walls. All dignity seemed forgotten, even that of a caged animal; he was only a mad old man in a nightgown, yelling till his voice cracked in frustration. “Stop that! Lal, Nyateneri—idiots, idiots, stop that! To me, you imbeciles—here, to me! You cannot kill him!” Arshadin had taken the nishoru form—more or less—a second time; now he spread those stubby, scabby, glittering wings and finally shook Nyateneri loose, hurling him ten yards away, back toward the riverbank. He landed rolling, but brought up hard against a rock. I could hear the wind retch out of his lungs even from that distance.
Arshadin was already turning, himself again, ignoring me as I ran past him toward Nyateneri. With his rightful shape, his ghastly blank calmness returned; he glanced briefly toward my friend, dancing and swearing futilely, then let his breath out in a long, barely audible sigh that became a bolt of black lightning and made exactly the same sound slashing into the grayness that a blade makes in flesh.
The grayness did not vanish or blow apart, but hissed and darkened like meat over a fire; in a moment I could not see my friend at all. Nyateneri was on his feet, swaying—I clutched his wrist and dragged him forward, while Arshadin shouted boulders and dharises after us. The rocks came careening down the cliffside out of nowhere, gouging real tracks in the dirt and bringing real trees and stones ripping and skidding down with them. I lost hold of Nyateneri and screamed for him until grayness came down over me like a heavy, smothering cloth over a birdcage, and an irritable voice announced, “Chamata, a little less bustle, if you don’t mind. This wretched thing is difficult enough to manage at the best of times.”
Close as he was, I could barely see him, let alone distinguish him from Nyateneri. He was sitting straight up, as though in a high-backed chair, slightly above my head. His eyes were closed. The river gorge, the house, and Arshadin were gone, as were earth, sky, and everything but the grayness, which had no dimension and no ending, but only dwindled off into a further grayness, in which, at the very end of my eyesight, I thought I saw darker shapes appearing and vanishing again. I asked loudly, “Where are we? What has happened? When are we?”
I have dealt with magicians before. There isn’t one of them, even the best—even my friend—who could ever resist the least excuse to play with time. I think it must be the first thing they are all warned never to do. True or not, it is the first thing they turn to in a crisis, as others turn to red ale. I dread it and want no part of it, ever, and I always know when it is happening again.
